To forget
by madelinear
Summary: It felt good to forget, but it felt better to remember.


To Forget  
Sugar Princess  
  
It was easier to forget. Simply put everything from your mind, live blissfully in the present.   
  
But some memories refuse to stay below the surface, obediently wafting around in the back of your mind. Instead, the clamor to the forefront, attacking you when you least expected it.  
  
The phrases 'never able to forget' and 'always remember' mean two very different things.  
  
If someone was to always remember something, it's generally because they want to. Happy memories are the ones people always want to hold on to, to be able to air when their life is not going as planned, or they're feeling melancholy, or if they're sharing their memories.  
  
Never being able to forget is what happens when something that effects you greatly happens. These types of memories are not the happy kind. They aren't stored neatly away, to be taken out and flipped through when convenient. The memories that you aren't able to forget are the dark kind, the kind that reach out at you with shadowy fingers and grab hold of your mind. There is no way to prepare for them. They attack, full force, until you no longer realize that you are safe, that it's really over. One can become so immersed in these kinds of memories that it can leave them with the same feeling that they had directly after the event that scarred them so.  
  
Memories cannot be described in a concrete way. Memories can mean many things.  
  
They are not always a reverie, where you withdraw yourself into a private world of another time, nor or they always all-consuming. Sometimes touching something can flash you back to another time, or a particular smell can bring you back to your childhood. Fragments of songs or a certain saying, a temperature, a trip to the ocean.  
  
After a while, one can become used to memories you-aren't-able-to-forget creeping up on them. People learn to avoid certain situations so as not to trigger them. Other times people sometimes wish, at the very bottom of their hearts, that they would remember, because it hurts more to stifle.  
  
Rose had realized very quickly that if you wanted to prevent heartache, you avoided what ever gave it to you. Ever years later, she knew better than to plunge into a newspaper. She would carefully examine it, almost subconsciously, to make sure nothing could jump out and surprise her. She was always prepared to deal with her emotions.  
  
Oceans didn't bother her, not any more: years had taken the edge off. The Pacific was so different from the Atlantic- so much friendlier and brighter. She could sit on the shore and listen to the waves pound against the surf unaffected. The salty smell of the sea air was refreshing. In the daytime.  
  
It was little things like that that Rose didn't bother to think of any more. She didn't go into the ocean, she didn't bother to go into detail as to why not. She would sit on the sand on a blanket and read and wave to those enjoying the water. She completely ignored history books in their entirety. She rarely read the newspapers.  
  
But when she was coerced back into the water it came back, pounding, too real to be just a memory. The balmy temperature of a California summer day was replaced too quickly by the arctic chill of an ocean too cold and too forbidding to be real. She would shudder uncontrollably, assaulted by memories of gunshots and suction, a haunting melody and prayers that echoed in the corners of her mind, and then, as always, the feeling as a comforting hand was ripped from hers, leaving her alone and helpless and frightened. Someone would take her out of the water, and she would get dry, quickly, because the salt water was not calming like the breeze was; it burned her skin and made her shiver. For days after she had gone into the ocean the smell of salt permeated her hair and her skin, but to her nose only. She had been branded by the sea.  
  
It was times like those when she became withdrawn from all activity around her. She always had a small, nagging sense of guilt for her 'abandoning' her family. But she found it impossible. Her own feelings were too raw, too close to the surface to be brushed aside.   
  
When the children were younger, they had a special reverence for when Mama disappeared into her room, transforming the room that so normally so inviting into a dark fortress. As they got older, they lost sympathy for their mother's moods, stomping past her room with impunity. They knew no one would punish them. No one talked about when Mama became sullen and vague. There was no discussion. The two teenagers had no pity for emotions that were not their own and were not privy to.  
  
On lucid days, she would think wryly that she enjoyed the guilt because it was a way of always staying with that night. Masochist, she'd chide herself, and during those unguarded moments a pair of blue eyes would gaze into her soul for a moment, stopping her dead in her tracks.  
  
She's grow pale and her legs would quake, hands shaking. She had broken more than a few dishes and glasses that way, always ignoring the mess as she wordlessly disappeared into her room.  
  
Rose enjoyed having the darkness swirl around her, lying on her bed, a pillow clutched to her chest to stop her shivering. There, she vivisected every moment of the sinking calmly and rationally. There was nothing she could have done differently, she tried to convince herself, trying for the umpteenth time to relieve herself of the guilt that had plagued her since that April night. She always vowed to put it out of her mind, and then a pleading face would appear, his voice halting and choppy, begging something of her. Her tears would start anew, her face falling before she drowned her sobs in her pillow until she could hardly breath and she lay, silently, shaking with grief, tears oozing from her eyes until she could cry no more.  
  
The day would end, and she would hear her children passing on their way to bed, calling good night to her- softly and reverently as children, disgustedly and bitterly as teenagers. She would struggle to compose herself without moving before her husband came in a few hours later. He would change into his pajamas in the dark, and slide into bed beside her. She could always feel his chocolate brown eyes boring into her from behind, silently pleading for her to share what was so horrible that even now the very thought could send her to her bed. What he would never know was that his soft, resigned sigh and his gentle 'Goodnight, Rose,' did more harm than good, because Rose would not rise from her depth of self-pity. Sometimes she felt a rage, and she wanted to yell at him for no reason other than she hated him because he climbed into bed beside her every night, ate dinner at the head of her table and resided over Christmas mornings and his eyes were brown, not a piercing blue that she still dreamed of. He was never him.  
  
He had taken on an idolized form, a god of sorts, a precious, untouchable thing that made Rose guard her secret all the more carefully. No one would ever be as charming, as loving, as sweet as him; no one would ever have his eyes or his smile, that lanky frame or that piece of golden hair that flopped across his forehead.  
  
Other times, her husband did nothing more than invoke pity, because he was so dear and kind a loving, and he was a good husband and a good father to their children, and in her own way, she did love him, but never the way love was meant to be. Love for him was detached, impersonal, guarded after twenty years of marriage. He had stopped early on trying to gain access to what had happened in the days before he had met Rose.  
  
But no matter how he tried to convince himself that Rose's "moods" were nothing more than a female oddity to be endured, he knew it was more than that, something that Rose had gone through and still fought with. It hurt him, because he loved Rose, and wanted to fight her battles for her, or to at least be able to help her. But Rose wanted no help, she was content to lay beside him, stiff as a board, lost in some hazy reality he had seen her descend into time and again.  
  
Normally, neither of them slept on these nights. He was never sure of what she would do, how deep her abyss melancholia had grown and what she would do about it, so he feigned sleep. Rose said not a word as she remembered golden days from years before, days that were tinged with a pink shade and sepia tints, days that were sweet and too wonderful to be true, days that grew into a dark night, and a dark night that grew into a nightmare, one that would startle her with it's reality and harsh reality that clashed in contrast to the gentle, stifled memories of the happy times.  
  
A few times, out of sheer exhaustion, Rose had drifted into a restless sleep while in this state, and her husband was heartbroken by what he heard. His beloved, beautiful, sweet little wife, thrashing beside him, calling for someone he'd never heard of and was never mentioned, wailing in her sleep. If she grew too loud, he'd fear for the children and touch her, and she'd awake, startled, peering into the darkness as if searching for something. When she saw it was just him, she's started to cry again, but allowed herself to be comforted for a few minutes before shrinking away, moving to the very edge of the bed and shaking the bed softly with her cries.  
  
In the morning she'd be herself, without any mention to the previous night's events. Her eyes were a bit red-rimmed, but other than that it was as if it had never happened. The children never mentioned it, nor did her husband. It was the deep, dark secret of the Calvert family, Mama's crazy days, Rose's "vapors".  
  
There were things that made Rose happy, too. She could stand with her face to the wind, her eyes closed, for long periods of time, without saying a word. Paintings always made Mama ecstatic, when the children were young she took them to museums, showing them all of the famous artists, stopping reverently when she got to Monet. She loved him best of all. Other little sayings of hers, when spoken, would give her pause and a little smile.  
  
It felt good to forget, but it felt better to remember. A memory of a pair of the most beautiful eyes she would ever see, strong, slightly rough hands, and a golden head paired with a loving smile. A promise she was compelled to keep, still after her, tagging along at her heels, a friendly little ghost that kept her company.  
  
And when no one was around, the bars of an old song would escape from her lips, and a smile like her family had never seen would grace her face as she remembered. 


End file.
